Why might Ethnic Minority Lib Dems be interested in supporting a motion to control and regulate the manufacture, distribution and sale of drugs.

There are two major aspects to the ways that “The War on Drugs” impacts upon the ethnic minority communities in Britain. Within Britain, ethnic minorities are disproportionally targeted by police stop and search powers, imprisoned at a greater rate, and generally victims of a degree of stereotyping in relation to drug use and crime. Beyond our shores, many of the countries where British ethnic minority communities have family ties have been affected by prohibition to a far more serious degree than the UK.

Suspicion of drugs possession is the single greatest reason for stop and search procedures to be taken against individuals and blacks are around six times more likely than whites to be subject to these procedures. Asians are also disproportionally affected, being stopped at nearly twice the rate of whites. This has implications for arrest rates, with the proportion of arrests of blacks resulting from stop and search procedures being twice that of the equivalent statistic for whites. This disparity in the use of stop and search undoubtedly contributes to the fact that there are 5 times as many British blacks in prison as a proportion of their population as there are whites. The proportion of black prisoners imprisoned for drugs offences is also 2-3 times higher than for whites, with other ethnic minority prisoners also twice as likely to be in prison for drugs offences.

Whether these figures are due to institutionalised racism, or whether they accurately reflect rates of drug-related criminal activity in ethnic minority communities, it is apparent that British ethnic minorities have more to gain from strict control and regulation of drugs that do British whites. Removing the influence of drug dealers and gangsters in inner city communities would remove a major driver of gang violence and a potentially lucrative criminal career option for inner city youth. It might be expected that these negative influences could be replaced by more positive role models and a greater interest in education, culture, and sport as means of advancement.

In the Caribbean murder rates are now higher than in any other region of the world, in large part due to the displacement of the cocaine trade from countries targeted by the US “War on Drugs”. West Africa is quickly becoming an easy target of the Colombian drugs cartels. Failed states like Guinea-Bissau are powerless in the face of the cocaine trade passing through their territory and many of these states' GDPs are dwarfed by the monetary worth of the drugs shipments they are expected to resist. There is also suggestion that a powerful franchise of Al-Qaida may be involved in the cocaine trade in Mali and Lebanese allies of Hezbollah may be purchasing some of the cocaine passing through the region.

What is for sure, is that the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan is heavily involved in the opium trade, with opium providing up to 50% of its income. Were the rest of the world allowed to grow and process opium to meet their requirements, the Taliban's power to spread their extremist world-view and terrorise the people of the region and beyond would be greatly reduced.

By strictly regulating and controlling the drugs trade we can remove the driver of horrific violence in the Caribbean and everywhere else where trafficking occurs, we can squeeze the funding streams of extremist terrorist groups threatening inter-faith relations around the world, and we can create communities free of drug-related crime in which people of all faiths and ethnicities can interact with less prejudice and fear.